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4 Tips for Creating the Perfect PowerPoint Presentation

There are some PowerPoint presentations that blow others out of the water. There are some with beautiful designs. There are others with actionable takeaways. Then there are those that offer solid advice. The perfect PowerPoint presentation, however, combines all of these.

A truly great presentation uses the format, design, and slides to tell a story. These presentations are interactive and have exclusive features. All of this needs to be incorporated to make a truly awesome presentation. The good news is that you can take these elements and use them with your own presentations with a little work.

4 tips for creating the perfect PowerPoint presentation

#1 Less is More

There is a reason that SlideShare exists. It gives users the ability to view information as a presentation without needing to present it through another platform. This is one of the main reasons people tune in to your presentation. They are interested in the topic and curious about who is making the presentation.

This is the reason that you should keep slides simple when delivering your presentation to your audience in-person. The focus should be on the message and not simply the individual slides. The slides must be on topic of course, but they should also be kept simple so people are able to take in what you say. The presentation offers a visual aid to support what you say.

#2 Use a Minimal Amount of Text

Less is certainly more when it comes to the text in the presentation; keep text to a minimum to ensure your presentation is simple. People are better able to recall information if it is paired up with images rather than text, so reinforce your message using visual content in slides.

#3 Rethink Your Choice of Visuals

Reducing how much text you have in your PowerPoint presentation means having to support your message using compelling images instead. This doesn’t mean that any old image will do. As is the case with content strategies, any visual elements of the presentation must be relevant and strategic to be the most effective.

• Templates
While the templates built into PowerPoint are much better than they used to be, they’re still very common. You should use a premium template that hasn’t been done to death to make the presentation more unique and stand out. You need one that perfectly matches the message you’re spreading and your brand.

• Charts and Graphs
Data and statistics is the best way to support the message of a presentation. What makes this so good is that you can represent them visually rather than having to put them in bullet form.

This is where you can make use of charts and graphs. They offer a bright and engaging way of presenting the information supporting your points. With this said, you need to ensure they match up with the overall visual theme of your presentation. If not, then it’s just going to distract the audience from the discussion at hand rather than complementing it.

• Color Themes
There has been research into the way that our emotions are influenced by colors, particularly when paired up with marketing messages. Some cases show that changing the color of a Call to Action button boosts conversion rates by up to 21%.

While the end goal of a presentation might not be to boost sales, you may still be trying to invoke a particular feeling or impression in the audience, which you can do with strategic color choices.

• Fonts
You want to make sure that the text you include in the presentation is readable so that your audience can consume your message and interpret it well enough to avoid being distracted from the message. If the text isn’t readable then the audience begins to focus on attempting to read it rather than listening to what it is you’re talking about.

We’d have to recommending using Sans Serif fonts as these take being readable over looking “fun”. Any text needs to be large enough for the people who sat at the back to read it, while also being the right color to stand out against the background.

• Image Quality
Making use of brilliant visual content in a presentation means nothing if you use low-quality images. The photos and the other visual aspects of the presentation need to be of a high enough resolution to be clear when presented on the large presentation screen.

#4 Use Multimedia

There’s a simple reason that people love seeing examples. It’s one thing to receive great advice, but it’s another to see it play out as it helps you believe that it could really work.

Video makes for brilliant visual content for engaging an audience with your presentation, as it does with everything else. 43% of people say that they want marketers to use more visual content because it illustrates and explains things in a way that can’t be done with just words and photographs.